SCI-Arc

SCI-Arc is an architecture school renowned for experimental, risk-taking work. But it’s also a cultural institution, bringing architectural lectures and exhibitions to downtown Los Angeles. And though it’s been around for over 40 years, it’s never had a consistent visual identity.

The school’s commitment to experimentation and reinvention resulted in years of wildly expressive posters, books, and digital projects. But while this work thrived, the school’s institutional identity suffered, with multiple ad-hoc logos in use at any given moment. The result was an institutional voice that failed to live up to the school’s reputation for excellence.

Rumors was hired to develop a new visual identity for the school. We decided to focus on the logo as a consistent anchor amidst the school’s appropriately chaotic graphic design output. It’s not a strict design system with prescribed rules for all promotional material; those decisions are left to SCI-Arc’s design team and collaborators.

The exception to this rule is the website, which we designed to showcase the best qualities of the identity. The site’s core concept is that informational text should feel hierarchically equal to images and video.

At the same time, the site acts as a deep catalog for the school and the admissions process, a growing collection of architectural videos, and an archive of lectures and exhibitions. This material had to feel accessible and clear, even as its content space was necessarily limited by our emphasis on image and video. So we designed a navigational system that allowed for a quick overview of the site’s structure, and which ends up as one of the site’s core features.